Nectar Gan, Joyce Jiang and Kocha Olarn
For three days, Wang Xing lived in fear. His head had been shaved. He couldn’t sleep and was in a strange place where his captors forced him to type – the first phase of training for an unwanted role.
The 31-year-old Chinese actor had flown to Bangkok for what he expected to be a movie casting call. Instead, he was picked up at the airport and driven to a scam center in Myanmar’s Myawaddy, a notorious cyber-fraud hub across the border from Thailand.
Wang is among hundreds of thousands of people who have been trafficked into scam compounds – many run by Chinese crime syndicates – that have proliferated in civil war-torn Myanmar and other parts of Southeast Asia in recent years. Often lured by the promise of well-paying jobs or other enticing opportunities, victims are held against their will and forced to carry out online fraud schemes in heavily guarded compounds, where former detainees say beatings and torture are common.
But Wang considers himself one of the lucky few. On January 7, just days after he was reported missing in the Thai border town of Mae Sot, Thai police said they located him in Myawaddy and brought him back to Thailand, without revealing the details of the operation.
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